Writing Blog Number 2

20240221 What Is A Story?

What Makes A Story

This is one of the first questions that was asked of me when I said I was going to be writing this blog.

And the answer is simple:

How long is a piece of string?

Seriously, there is nothing hard and fast. However, something needs to happen. And it needs to happen to characters, even if they are inanimate objects. And this happening should result in a change, whether to the characters, emotions, their world or to something important to the story. Even a perception of the world; like, what changed in a Godzilla film? Humans suddenly knew about another kaiju or that Godzilla had powers they didn’t know about. It’s a small change, but it is still a change, one that could have far-reaching implications.

That is actually rather simplistic, and this brings up a technicality that many writers argue about – the difference between story and plot. Plot is often taken as the sequence of events, the order in which things happen. The story, on the other hand, is the bits that make a story more than just a series of “then… then… then…” events. Story brings a story to life, focusing on characters, emotional beats, underlying themes, etc.

To go a little further on this point: all fiction and a lot of non-fiction is based on a story. Something happens. It starts, there’s a middle section with the action, there’s an ending and the people involved have gone through a lot. Many consider it a story, as I said, only if there is a change. But, again, some works indicate that is not always the case. Story-telling is what makes this story into something interesting or worth reading.

To explain this, a plot without a real story is an anecdote, like a guy telling a story at the pub, or a vignette (an event with no set-up or real pay-off). The pub guy and his mate were fishing, a seal stole all their fish, they gave up and went home. Is that really a story? Was anything actually changed (apart from a seal getting a meal)? If the tale started with waking up, deciding to go fishing because they’d had a bad week at work, casting their lines, discovering that fish keep going missing, getting angry, finally seeing the seal, and realising the bad week is going to stay bad, so they went to the pub instead, and what had changed is that they are resigned to their fate, the theme of acceptance is there. Now we have added a little bit of story-telling, and the anecdote has started to become what is considered a proper story.

This is where it becomes awkward because some stories feel like nothing has changed. Last Year At Marienbad (a boring film that won awards everywhere) is a prime example. Whether you consider that a story or not is your own interpretation, but to me it feels more like a stream of consciousness.

So, what I am saying is that publishers will have expectations of something happening and a change occurring with some sort of theme (even if not necessarily overt; I personally do not write to a theme, but they apparently exist in my writing). But that is not necessarily the case. Experimental writing can be story-less. Anecdotes can be simple and without story elements, just bare bone plots.

But, in the end, the simplest explanation for what makes a story a story is: do you like what you have written and are you, the writer, entertained by it? If yes, then it's a story. It's your story.